Bush before September 11: the awful truth

Revelations last week by Richard Clarke - Bush's
counter-terrorism guru until just before the Iraq invasion - could
destroy the Bush presidency. I asked Webdiarist Kerryn Higgs, a
Australian living in New York who's been glued to live TV coverage of
Clarke's evidence to the Sepetmber 11 inquiry, to report the
controversy.

Her first report is on what Bush did and didn't do before September 11.
She's working on a report on Clarke's revelations of what happened on
September 11 and immediately afterwards.

The failure to prevent 9/11: Clarke's story

by Kerryn Higgs

Richard Clarke, the U.S. counterterror
co-ordinator under every administration since Reagan, began his session
in front of the 9/11 Commission on Wednesday with the only apology anyone has yet offered to the families of those who died:

"To the loved ones of the victims of 9/11… here in the room…
watching on television, your government failed you. Those entrusted
with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but
that doesn't matter, because we failed. And for that failure, I would
ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your
forgiveness."

Though critics of Clarke have charged him with self-serving theatricality,
he looked and sounded absolutely sincere to me. Dozens of the family
members who sat behind him applauded, and gathered at the end of his
testimony to hug him.

***

It’s been quite a week in the
USA, as a whole lot more evidence came into focus about the role of
Iraq in George W Bush’s agenda. Clarke has raised yet more questions
about the failure to prevent the catastrophic events of 9/11 and the
push for war on Iraq.

Clarke’s book, Against all Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, hit the bookshops on Monday, March 22. The night before, most of 60 Minutes was devoted to Clarke.

On Wednesday afternoon, he appeared before the Commission of inquiry
into the September 11 attacks. A dedicated career public servant and a
registered Republican who was appointed by Reagan and served all
governments up to his resignation last year, Richard Clarke is not
easily brushed aside – though there’s been a sustained government
effort to undermine his credibility.

Daniel Shaw, commentator for National Public Radio (NPR), was asked at
the end of the week whether Bush’s neglect of Al Qaeda had anything to
do with a reflexive rejection of Clinton’s foreign policy priorities.
Shaw thought maybe more than reflexive, and told this story. When the
two Presidents met, as is traditional, just hours before Bush’s
inauguration, Clinton gave Bush his five top priorities:1.
Israel-Palestine; 2. Terrorist threat from al Qaeda; 3. North Korea; 4.
India-Pakistan; 5. Iraq. “I would take the fifth one first,” Bush
answered, according to Shaw.

The thrust of Clarke’s criticism of the Bush people is that they were living in the past. He told 60 Minutes:

"I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold
War issues when they got back in power in 2001. It was as though they
were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier.
They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away:
Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed
over the preceding eight years.”

When it came to al Qaeda,
Clarke was without doubt the most worried of Clinton’s staff and when
he was retained by the new administration, soon discovered that his
sense of urgency was marginalised:

“On January 24th of 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking
for, urgently – underlined urgently – a cabinet level meeting to deal
with the impending al Qaeda attack and that urgent memo wasn't acted
on.”

Instead he was asked to attend a meeting of the deputies, rather than the chiefs; and even that was put off until April:

“I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden. We have to deal
with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz the Deputy Sec'y of Defense said, 'No,
no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about
that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the
United States.' And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi
terrorism against the United States in eight years,' and I turned to
the Deputy Director of [the] CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' and he
said, 'Yeah, that's right.’”

The cabinet meeting on terrorism did not occur until September 4th.
Meanwhile, in months of meetings with Wolfowitz and other deputies
covering a range of issues related to terrorism, he could find no-one
interested in addressing al Qaeda as a specific high-priority threat.
In an interview with Terry Gross on National Public Radio program Fresh Air,
Clarke said the administration was instead engrossed in a plan to
“reshape the Middle East, by knocking off Saddam Hussein, going in and
building democracy”.

“They had this sort of messianic view of the US as a great
superpower that could just put its hand [in]… and rip out a regime and
remould a country and then that would have ripple effects.”

When the policy Rice claims she had spent seven months “developing” was
tabled on September 4th, it was virtually identical to the plan Clarke
had handed her in January. He sent her a desperate memo on September
4th urging policy-makers to “imagine a day after hundreds of Americans
lay dead at home or abroad after a terrorist attack and ask themselves
what else they could have done”. The attacks were seven days away.

“All of the things we recommended back in January were those things
on the table in September…They were done after September 11th. They
were all done. I didn't really understand why they couldn't have been
done in February.”

But like everyone else appearing here, he
conceded that doing those things was not likely to have prevented the
attacks - Clarke’s plan had to do with obliterating the al Qaeda
training camps in Afghanistan, supporting the Northern Alliance against
the Taliban, getting the Predator drones armed and ready to strike or
going after al Qaeda funding. By February 2001, the 9/11 plot was most
likely finalised, and weakening bin Laden or the camps unlikely to
affect the outcome.

A more likely avenue of action against the hijackers’ plans lay in
tightening the flawed domestic security system. This aspect was not
really covered by last week’s hearings (there will be more), though
Chairman Kean told CBS TV
on Wednesday evening, that “a whole number of circumstances, had they
been different, might have prevented 9/11… they involve everything from
how people got into the country to failures in the intelligence
system.”

These failures include demarcation issues between the CIA and the FBI
and simple communications failure between and within the agencies. Newsweek of June 10th, 2002 recounted an unhappy series of errors and oversights that allowed two hijackers to function unimpeded.

In January 2000, the CIA tracked Alhazmi and Almihdhar (who flew with
Atta on Flight 77) from a Malaysian meeting of terrorism suspects back
to California. But the CIA did not pass this on to the FBI – which is
solely responsible for security matters at home. The two men lived
openly while they went to flight school, had driver’s licences and
phone connections under their own names, travelled abroad, got new
visas and periodically met up with other plotters.

In August, with the “chatter” spiking, CIA chief Tenet ordered a review
of files and the FBI was finally told about them. They were not
located, though it’s unclear whether the FBI tried the phone book,
which might have done the trick. But it is clear that the suspects’
names were not placed on intercept lists at domestic airports. Richard
Clarke too, ostensible counterterror chief, was not informed.

Clarke
had already told the Commission during many hours of closed testimony
that he wished he had known. Asked by Commissioner Roemer what he would
have done, he conceded he couldn’t say for sure but hoped he would have
launched a manhunt using front-page pictures, World’s Most Wanted,
whatever it took, to track them down.

That same summer, two separate FBI agencies tried to pass warnings up
the line to their bosses. An agent in Phoenix warned his headquarters
in July 2001 that Osama bin Laden's followers might be studying at
flight schools in preparation for terrorist attacks (see New York Times
at http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/national/03TERR.html
- registration required). The FBI didn’t yet know about Almihdhar and
Alhazmi doing flight training and the report was shelved.

FBI agents in Minnesota also arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in mid-August
2001. His lack of interest in taking off and landing and a preference
for steering big jets in the flight simulator alerted instructors, who
were aware that an airliner could be used as a missile. The FBI
interviewed an associate, who revealed that Moussaoui was deeply
anti-American and had links to extremist groups. One agent described
him as the kind of guy who could “fly something into the World Trade
Centre”. His colleague, Coleen Rowley,
attempted to get search warrants to follow up the lead, but her
submissions were rejected by superiors. The Minneapolis office became
so frustrated with the obstacles put up by supervisors in Washington
that they began to joke that FBI headquarters was in league with bin Laden.

Although these particular clues were buried, top officials did know in
the summer of 2001 that something horrific was about to happen. The President’s Daily Brief (PDB)
of August 6th was delivered to the Crawford ranch, where Bush was on
holidays. Presumably he read it – but he did not interrupt his
vacation. He has resisted disclosure of its contents ever since. Only
two members of the Commission were finally allowed to see it and make
notes – and the notes have been the subject of attempted suppression by
Bush. There have, however, been various leaks, starting with the Los Angeles Times
back in May 2002, which said the August 6th memo warned that al Qaeda
might contemplate hijacking U.S. aircraft and that bin Laden wanted to
conduct attacks in the United States, where al Qaeda members had been
residing and travelling for years.

According to David Corn in the Nation, quoting House and Senate intelligence committees an intelligence warning in early July 2001, had noted:

"We believe that [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist
attack against the U.S. and/or Israeli interests in coming weeks. The
attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties
against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been
made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."

Almost everyone maintains that the attack was expected to occur
overseas, though Clarke testified that Tenet did not rule out a strike
at home. Condoleezza Rice has denied that the PDB of August 6th was
specific, claiming it contained only a general warning about al Qaeda.

As for the July warning, Bush has never allowed the intelligence
committees to reveal whether he and Rice saw it, only that “senior
government officials” did. Rice said, in May 2002:

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that those people could
have taken an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center . . .
that they would try to use an airplane as a missile."

The Washington Post, however, now writes that Commissioner
Richard Ben-Veniste has revealed that Rice has been having second
thoughts. She apparently wants to revise this 2-year-old statement,
confessing that she “misspoke”. So far, she refuses to testify in
public on oath and, as the administration’s attack on Clarke proceeds,
there is a sense of something akin to panic, with officials
contradicting each other on many aspects.

It’s clear that the administration remains anxious to suppress
information on what they knew in the lead-up to 9/11. There are
numerous signs that they had a lot more information about the nature of
the threat than has been openly shared with the public. It was only
concerted pressure from the families that forced Bush to convene the
independent Commission, which he tried hard to avoid and has hindered whenever he could.

So
if vital clues were buried in the system, and the CIA, knowing an
attack was imminent, was issuing hair-raising warnings, it’s fair to
ask: what could have stirred the system up in time and did the
government do it?

Clarke contrasts Clinton’s handling of the spike in intelligence
“chatter” of December 1999 in the lead-up to the millenium with how
Bush handled the even bigger spike in the summer of 2001. Clinton
chaired near-daily meetings with Justice, CIA, FBI, Defence and all
relevant principals, including Clarke. Every day, they had to go back
to their departments, “shake the trees” and return with whatever they
could find.

During December 1999, the FBI shared its intelligence fully – rare for
the FBI and something that ceased straight afterwards. Clarke believes
that the successful interception of the LA international airport bomber
was due in part to the extraordinary level of alert that Clinton put in
place through this pressure on his agencies.

In the summer of 2001, when the “spectacular” attack was expected and
CIA chief Tenet was described as “running around with his hair on
fire”, this kind of process did not occur. Bush met with Tenet most
days, but did not chair meetings of all chiefs as Clinton had done – or
order Rice to do so.

Clarke
also mentions that “there was a hiatus” in August – presumably because
that’s when people go on holiday. Bush spent August at the ranch. Clues
already existed and Clarke believes that intense pressure like
Clinton’s might have brought some of the evidence to light.

It
seems possible that the Bush people understood neither the source nor
the nature of the threat. On April 30, 2001, CNN reported that the
government's annual terrorism report lacked the extensive coverage of
bin Laden seen in previous years. Asked why the Administration had
reduced the focus, "a senior Bush State Department official” told CNN
the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden".

The Detroit News
reported that only 2 of about 100 national security meetings had dealt
with terrorism in the months before 9/11 – and one of these was that of
September 4th, impatiently awaited by Clarke.

Two veteran CIA
counter-terrorism experts were so frustrated that summer that they
considered resigning and making public their fears about an imminent
terrorist strike against US targets. Whether or not determined
attention and aggressive “tree-shaking” could have prevented the
attacks, we will never know, but it’s pretty clear that Bush and his
team were otherwise occupied.

*
Transcripts of both days’ public hearings plus links to video and audio coverage can be found at the Washington Post.

This site is home to many debates, and the views expressed on this site are not necessarily those of the site editors.
Contributors submit comments on their own responsibility: if you believe that a comment is incorrect or offensive in any way,
please submit a comment to that effect and we will make corrections or deletions as necessary.